I believe the future of business and commitment building resides in the idea of viewing your business as a platform for your community.

The notion of a platform is one that receives a fair amount of play in various contexts.

An author is said to possess a platform when they have built a following. Consultants might work with a business owner to build a platform through speaking, writing, blogging and connecting in social media. And finally, many tech firms have built platforms by creating open source software, such as WordPress, that allows other 3rd party providers to build commerce and community on top of their framework.

Amazon sells lots of books, but in order to do that they needed to develop lots of file serving and storage capacity and get very, very good at delivering lightning quick web results in one of the highest traffic demand environments online.

Amazon took something that had little to do with their existing business, but which they had become incredibly proficient at, and created Amazon Web Services that allows thousands of business to build on the Amazon framework. I host and stream all of my product videos using Amazon S3 servers.

Airbnb is a community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect with each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. I use it frequently and love how simple the service is to use. Airbnb is built on Amazon Web Services and uses their database tools to build their community.

I would like to suggest that the notion of a platform is one that we can apply to almost any business.

What is a platform in this context?

A platform is a system that helps people create products, services, profits, businesses, communities, and networks of their own. The dynamics that must be present to create a platform environment are openness and collaboration.

So, the questions you need to ponder are:

• How could you or your business act as a platform?
• What could others build on top of your business or products?
• How could you add more value through your platform approach?
• How could you grow a network on your platform?
• Are there other businesses that your platform could launch?
• How could your community generate value for each other?
• How could your platform learn from community members?
• How could you create something open enough to attract your competitors?
• What platforms already exist that you could build on?
• Could you use your existing purpose, culture or community as a platform?
• What could you acquire as a way to build a platform?
• What could you extend as a way to build a platform?

When you start to think about your business in this manner you can move beyond the traditional applications of the term platform and blend platform type thinking into your business model, your culture and ultimately how you engage and communicate with your community.

Find your unique framework for openness

The key is to locate your unique framework as the foundation for the platform. Often times this requires thinking far outside of what your core business was designed to do and looking purely at things you can do, things you’ve gotten good at doing, even if they are simply things you do to support your core business.

AppleTree Answers is a call center business headquartered in Wilmington Delaware. The company has built a platform of sorts by figuring out how to change the paradigm of the call center culture. The company has received numerous awards for workplace excellence and is a frequent member of the Inc 500 and 5000.

AppleTree’s rapid growth then has come about by acquiring other small call centers and installing Appletree’s unique framework of openness. Appletree’s strong culture is the platform they’ve built all of their expansion on.

It’s all about building more value

A major dynamic of the platform component is value creation. No matter what your business does it will sink or swim based on the value (perceived or otherwise) it creates in someone’s life. This is extremely so when we talk about the community aspect of a platform.

Further, if you want to differentiate your business from others that are already providing value to a market, you’ve got to find a way to create more value as a competitive edge.

Many people default to adding features to products and services as a way to address value, but I think the real impact in value creation comes from strategically finding ways to add value in the way your business delivers a unique experience to its customer rather than through some sort of product enhancement.

The beauty of understanding value creation at the strategic level and then forcing that thinking into every tactical decision is that this is some of the most profitable work you can do. When a market comes to value what you have to offer as the “go to” choice you’re on your way to a premium pricing opportunity. People will pay dearly for an experience that helps them get more of what they want out of life.

Image:One-Fat-Man via Flickr CC

The poll question above is a bit loaded and, not that I want to skew the results, the answer for most lies in the fact that they don’t really know what results they expected or what result they are actually getting. Mostly they know the results aren’t what they had hoped for, but that’s another issue.

Setting expectations

One of the simplest, yet most effective, things you can do is set expectations or goals for your marketing. You can create overall revenue goals, campaign goals or more product or service specific goals, but either way, simply defining a target number will prove to be one of the best first steps.

Goals are like magnets in a way. If we define them and measure our results towards achieving them, they can produce some pretty dramatic pull.

I know this is an obvious bit of advice, but experience tells me that few businesses actually set real, tangible and meaningful targets. How many widgets do you need to sell this month? How many press mentions do you want to add this quarter? How many newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees or trial evaluations must you complete this week?

Measuring results

Once you define your marketing expectations you must define and track the most important indicators that will tell you if you are on track.

You can make this is a simple as a weekly sales total or as complex as the results of multivariate ad element testing, but the key is start measuring something and sharing the numbers.

If you’re not measuring anything, break a few key numbers down and figure out a way to produce a weekly spreadsheet that you use as a guide and also use to share with team members. Then start looking for ways to add key indicators to the list so in addition to simply measuring results you can start measuring individual effectiveness.

Add Google Analytics to your web site and pick up a copy of Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
by Avinash Kaushik.

If you’ve been measuring key indicators and you’re comfortable with a tool like Google Analytics, consider looking at a more advanced form of measurement from the use of a tool like KissMetrics. This tool can measure so many things that it can also overwhelm, so don’t start here unless you’ve mastered the basics.

I believe that one of the greatest opportunities we have as business owners is to create wealth.

By that I don’t necessarily mean get wealthy. I mean create an asset, a business, which is worth more today than it was yesterday. All too often this view gets buried in the push to create a paycheck.

In my view there are much easier ways to draw a salary than owning a business.

The real magic in the wealth creation opportunity comes when you also see it as a way to create wealth for all of the people the work to increase the market value of the business.

Image Doug Brown 37 via Flickr CC

The key to this notion is shared ownership.

Sharing ownership with employees has become much more popular in the world of Internet startups and IPOs. The idea is that if people have stock they’ll be more productive.

The problem with this mentality however is that if employees don’t have psychic ownership first and foremost, real ownership probably won’t benefit anyone.

Psychic ownership suggests a culture where employees feel like owners, act like owners and think like owners, even though they may not actually have any formal equity in the company.

The fact is many companies try to explore this idea of ownership but approach it in name only.

If employees don’t feel like they have a stake it what happens, don’t have access to the financial data or can’t make decisions that impact the value of their ownership, then all the stock options in the world won’t help. In fact, organizations that simply adopt an ownership or equity type of environment based on paper only find that it can be a disincentive and create entitlement without accountability.

Until you can create a culture that fosters psychic ownership first – a place where people feel empowered as owners, even if they’re not – you’ll never realize the benefits of providing real ownership.

The combination of a psychic ownership environment and real ownership structure, however, is perhaps the most potent tool for the creation of commitment that can be employed.

Creating a culture of shared ownership

When Sky Factory founder Bill Witherspoon determined, approaching sixty, that he would start yet another company he sat back and analyzed his past failures and successes and concluded that he had never been very good at managing people or the organization once it had grown to a certain level.

So, he decided to throw everything he had ever done or learned about traditional management out and start with a totally new view of how to build, in his words, a “beautiful corporation,” also something of an oxymoron in his view.

Having a background in bioscience he determined that every organization’s DNA lies in the company culture and he knew he had to direct that element over all else. The company’s core beliefs sprung from that thinking, but became much more than words on sign.

Transparency – Now, there’s a word that’s been abused in business writing over the last few years, but taken at face value, and in this context, it simply means sharing everything with everyone in the company.

Every Friday afternoon the entire staff gathers to go over the metrics one by one – even things like how much cash is in the bank is reported. (The only metric that is not public is individual salaries.) Every department talks about goals and challenges and the entire team of 40 can discuss any element that’s shared.

When issues arise that need to be shared quickly, they call impromptu “stand up” meetings and shut down so that everyone can be involved.

Autonomy –There are no vice presidents, no managers, and no shop supervisors at The Sky Factory. If they had an organization chart it would be very flat.

The company is organized into functional teams based on related work and each team uses a rotating facilitation model to keep things moving in place of the traditional manager.

Every week two members of a team take on the role of management (one from last week and one new one.) Everyone on the team takes a turn and Witherspoon feels that this concept allow people to learn, grow and earn greater respect from other members of the staff.

This no hierarchy approach removes politics and frees people to stretch far beyond the confines of the normal job description. The Sky Factory has numerous job descriptions that are tied to functional work that must be done, but the goal is to create a workplace where everyone can essentially do everything.

There certainly are instance where this isn’t practical or possible, but no one gets tethered to one kind of work, no one gets bored and everyone is asked to grow and given the opportunity to do work that continually stretches them.

The Sky Factory also finds that experience built in continuous improvement by letting new people provide a fresh approach in processes and systems.

Consensus – Every important decision made at The Sky Factory is made through a system of consensus. Some decisions are departmental, others are company wide, but if there’s even one no, the decision must be evaluated.

Decenters are asked to explain and own their no votes and more often than not the no simply leads to more research or looking at a decision in a new light, but everyone has a real voice in the process.

Sky Factory also uses consensus to impact operations – The Company was experiencing a high percentage of late deliveries on promised projects. They had tried a number of process improvements to no avail. During one of their weekly meeting an employee suggested that they should tie profit sharing bonuses to delivery. The group agreed and the rule became that if even one delivery missed its promised date during a month, no one in the organization would receive that month’s profit sharing bonus.

Since installing this rule several years ago they virtually eliminated the problem. Everyone in the organization is now concerned about late deliveries and everyone is focused on pitching in and solving any potential snags in any part of the production process. And you can bet that if someone is having an issue with an order they ask for help.

Of course consensus won’t work if there’s no transparency and truly no hierarchy. Consensus as a stand-alone tool is a recipe for disaster, but teamed with complete sharing of information and rotational management, it is the tool that turns everyone into an owner.

Now, Sky Factory also has an incredibly innovative profit sharing and real ownership structure, but the key to making it work in their incredible shared ownership culture.

When an entrepreneur starts a business and it’s just them, they have all the information, have no hierarchy and get consensus on every decision – shared ownership thinking simply takes this to another level.

You need lots of content, you know that, but you also know that content creation is one of the more time intensive marketing activities you have to tackle.

While you do need to create your own content as the foundation for your total content and teaching strategy, you can – and should – supplement your content with that from other people.

Image hazel.estrada via Flickr CC

One of the best services marketers can provide these days is to act as a filter for all that’s being produced out there and aggregate the best of the best on behalf of our communities.

Finding and sharing consistently high quality, relevant content and adding insight to this information is not only a great way to increase the volume of your content, it’s a great way build trust in the value of your content.

Here are five ways to add other people’s content to your routine.

Cobrand a winner

Lots of people produce great content in the form of downloadable white papers and eBooks. In some cases they do this to attract newsletter subscribers and links, but quite often they do it because they know something about a topic and want to document it.

With just a little bit of searching you can probably turn up a great eBook that your network would love to get their hands on. Now, some people might simply link to this content, but I’d like to suggest another way.

What if you approached the eBook author and asked if you could send it out to your networks, with full credit to the author, but with the ability to add one simple information page about you or your company at the back?

With this approach you could potentially build a library of content overnight with the right topics and content.

Here’s how to get started.

Use the Google filetype operator to find lots of potential candidates on just about any topic you can imagine. Here’s how it works. If you want to find PDF documents and eBooks about content curation, for example, you would type: content curation filetype:pdf into a Google search box.

This tells Google you are looking for content related to content curation, but you only want results that are pdf files. This way you’ll probably turn up any number of candidates for cobranding projects.

Email newsletter snacks

Publishing a weekly email newsletter is a proven way to stay top of mind with your community. Of course, offering a great free eBook as mentioned above is a great way to build that weekly newsletter list.

As you compete for inbox space you must keep in mind that your newsletter content must be consistently useful, relevant and convenient.

One of the best ways to meet these qualifications is to produce high quality content filtered from other sources and delivered in snack-sized bites. Think in terms of an email newsletter that might contain 5-6 great articles presented with abstracts that lay out in about 100 words with someone might want to click through and read the rest.

Using tools like AllTop, GoogleReader, NewsVine or PopULRs you can easily locate and aggregate content related to topics of interest to your readers. You may also be able to locate local bloggers that could be great candidates for guest content and strategic relationships.

Curate a magazine

The idea of curating content is very hot right now, but in order to really make it pay you’ve got to also be ready to add insight. So many people look at curation as something more closely aligned with republishing.

Republishing content you find does have value, but narrowly targeting a very specific topic and becoming known as a trusted source of insight on the vast array of information being published on any topic is how you take content curation to a new level.

Below are some of my favorite tools for creating your curated online content magazines.

• MySyndicaat – http://mysyndicaat.com/home
• Scoop.it – http://www.scoop.it/
• Storify – http://storify.com/
• Curation Station – http://curationstation.com/

You can also use tools like Delicious, Evernote, Pinterest or Pearltrees to simply clip, bookmark and organize content you find for republication.

If you want to really know how to get great at this follow Robin Good – Here’s a great place to start – What Makes A Great Curator Great?

RSS to HTML

This technique is perhaps a bit more technical, but it also allows you the greatest control.

Just about all online content these days comes powered by RSS making it easy to convert whatever find into a feed that can be converted to HTML code and displayed on any page we like.

For example, if you wanted to publish positive mentions of your firm on a new page on your site you simply set up Google Alerts so that you received notice that your firm was mentioned. Click through to the page and assuming it’s something you want to publish to your site you would bookmark the content using PinBoard and tag like “ournews.”

PinBoard creates tag based RSS feeds so anything you tag with ournews can be displayed in a specific RSS feed. This gives you total control over what you want to appear in the feed.

Once you create the feed you can take it to FeedBurner or RSSInclude to convert the feed to HTML code that you can embed on a page or widget to easily display the content from the feed wherever you choose.

Then any time you bookmark a new item it will publish to the page.

Ask little things

One of the best ways to get lots of people to create content for you around a specific topic is to ask lots of people to answer one very short question.

This can be a great way to collect lots of suggestions, opinions and insights to support or start a topic of interest to your readers.

The other powerful thing about his approach is that you can often get higher profile contributors to participate if all you are asking them to do is answer one question or finish one statement.

Once you collect all of your answers you simply collect them and add context and analysis.

It’s time to make other people’s content one of your content foundation planks.

So often marketers get stuck in the reaction of the week kind of marketing and wonder why it always feels like such a bumpy road.

Marketing should feel graceful, thoughtful, even joyful, but that takes planning, process and patience – mostly though that takes systems thinking.

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years singing the “marketing is a system” tune and today I’m pleased to introduce my most ambitious compilation of all that I know about how to build a marketing system today.

Introducing the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing – a complete online guided training tool designed to help you build your marketing action plan and install your marketing system.

The tool takes your down a logical path through 13 step by step lessons that contain video tutorials, audio lesson, downloadable workbooks, examples, forms and loads of related resources.

How the modules in the system are organized - click to enlarge

I’ve also seen a lot of people with good intentions buy a lot of books and courses and fail to move forward because they lacked any support or accountability.

So, everyone that enrolls in the Ultimate Marketing System program also gets 30 days of email support, monthly live Q and A calls, a 30 minute consulting session, and a plan review. We won’t rest until you get this thing built!

And as with everything I’ve ever produced, you have a full no questions asked money back guarantee if you decide it’s not for you.

Go check it out today and get to work building your marketing system before the sun goes down on another day.

Get More Details and Enroll here

This week Google realigned it’s search results to officially add a feature that many had witnessed leaking into search results

The new functionality is potentially as important as the switch to Universal Search a few years ago. (I say potentially because Google seems to have a knack for live testing.)

The feature is something called Google Search Plus Your World – doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but most are simply calling it Search Plus.

The idea is that Google is going to give you the option to search with results focused primarily on those in your social circles. Currently, this has heavy focus on Google+ as Facebook and Twitter don’t seem interested in helping Google paint a bigger picture at the moment.

The functionality is switched on and off with a little selector that shows up in the right hand corner of your browser window when you are logged into your Google account. (Oddly, the feature shows up in Chrome and Safari, but not in Firefox for me at the moment.)

The results are sort of fascinating at the moment as it’s fun to see some of this data organized in this manner. Time will tell whether or not this is a killer feature, but there are some things to like and certainly some things to note.

The rel=author attribute is more important than ever. I wrote about adding rel=author a while back but it seems it’s in full swing now. I am seeing search results for generic, but important search terms produce my homepage with my photo next to the results making it stand out even more. (For the time being it appears you can use the attribute on any page you author and eventually create this result – NB: for the time being, we’ll see how sorts out.) See the images below.

Page one results for search term - small business marketing

Page one results for search term - Pinterest for business

Notice my image to the left of the results from my site and the “more from John Jantsch” link embedded in the results. This came about through Google’s author highlighting that ties the rel=author attribute on all my pages to my Google+ profile and it’s hard not to think that highlighting makes that result stand out on the page. (Note: these searches were conducted while signed out of my Google account.)

Google is going to force you to like Google+ – okay that may be a bit strong but right now there is very strong evidence that playing in Google+ will benefit you when it comes to showing in Search Plus. It’s do in part to the vast amount of content that Google has total access to there and I’m sure it will settle down some or Google will damage its search integrity, but for now the connection is pretty blatant. See the image below.

Page one results for search term marketing - with Search Plus on

Go read up on the rel=author attribute and go listen to my interview with Google+ maestro Chris Brogan and you’ll be off and running in the Search Plus game.

Listening is a skill that all marketers must develop. Or, perhaps more accurately, redevelop.

s1ng0 via Flickr CC

Most people are born with the ability to hear and, over time, interpret what’s being said. Somewhere along the line we get so consciously competent at hearing that we no longer feel the need to listen.

I believe that one of the master skills of any marketer, manager, or educator is the ability to listen perceptively to what our prospects, customers, staff and community members are saying. And I further believe this is something we all have to work at.

So, what is perceptive listening?

People that teach this sort of thing might say there are many forms of listening.

Passive listening – the kind we do when we are listening to a seminar but we’re really scrolling through Pinterest.

Selective listening – the kind that I might practice when I’m discussing something with someone and mostly I’m thinking about what I’m going say next.

Active listening – the kind where we are discussing something with someone and reacting only to the words being said.

Perceptive listening – the kind where I hear and interpret the words, but I also consider what the person is thinking and perhaps how they are acting as they say the words.

Perceptive listening is by far the most complex because it requires you to be totally focused, completely mindful and, well, perceptive of what’s really going on.

Perceptive listening is also something the party being listened to can feel. We’ve all grown pretty numb to act of conversing with people while they divide their attention between our words and their iPhone.

Perceptive listening is how you tell when a prospect says they’re not ready to buy, but what they are really saying is they don’t understand the benefits.

Perceptive listening is how you mentor an employee. It’s how you draw out what they are truly passionate about. It’s how you help them self manage and lead.

I believe you can even use perceptive listening to monitor the things you say to yourself. When you are mindful enough to stop and witness your own thoughts and perceive how they truly make you feel, your actions will be much more perceptive.

Effective listening can be learned and takes practice. It’s a habit of sorts, just like multi tasking is a habit.

Below are five exercises that I challenge you to undertake in an effort to first experience your level of perceptive listening and bring this art front and center in everything you do.

Listening to a client

Make a list of five clients you respect and would like to understand better. Set a time to sit down with them and ask them these three questions. Make certain that you give their answers your full attention and pay close attention to how they answer, including their body language.

1. What’s the one thing you love about what we do?
2. If you referred us to a friend what would you say?
3. What’s the biggest challenge you have in your business right now?

Listening to a staff member

You know the drill now, but this time choose a member of your staff that you would like to develop further and start with these questions.

1. What’s the one thing you love most about coming to work here?
2. If you referred us to a friend what would you say?
3. What’s the biggest challenge you have in meeting your objectives right now?

Listening to yourself

This might be the toughest act yet, but sit down and ponder these questions posed to yourself and pay attention to how you feel about the answers. You aren’t really looking for right or wrong answers I don’t think, you’re merely checking for cracks in the alignment.

1. What’s the one thing you love most about what you do?
2. Why do you really do what you do?
3. If you could do anything you wanted, would this be it?

Listening in space

Put on a piece of instrumental music. (If you’re looking for a suggestion you can’t go wrong with a Bach cello concerto.) Close your eyes and try to focus on the rests and spaces between the notes only. Listen keenly for what musicians refer to as grace notes, the little half played notes that flick inside a pause or come in between a beat.

This is a completely different way to listen to music and I think it can help tune your sensitivity to the art of listening to the complete story.

You can’t have art or music without this negative space and I think the same is true when it comes to perceptive listening.

Listening in space 2

Another exercise I love to do is to sit somewhere in a room and close my eyes. Once I kind of empty my thoughts I start actively listening for the sounds right around me – the water running in the pipes, the printer, a stereo playing.

Next I try to move my listening out farther to focus on the street sounds – the cars passing by, the construction work across the street, people coming and going.

Finally, I try to move my listening out as far as I can. Through this targeted listening I can perceive an airplane overhead and a train slowly rumbling through another part of town.

Some of the exercises above might seem like odd ways to get better at marketing, but marketing is mostly about listening to and understanding what’s really going on all around you.

I wish I could give you a crisp definition of what the word culture, with regard to business, really means. It’s a tricky word that finds its way into most discussions regarding the workplace these days.

Like so many things, it’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.

The thing is, every business has a culture. It may be strong or weak, positive or negative, or just plain hard to spot, but it’s like a form of internal brand in a way. It’s the collective impression, habits, language, style, communication and practices of the organization.

Some elements of culture are intentional, some are accidental. Some are rooted deeply in the ethos of an original employee group, some are created out of a lack of any real direction or clarity.

My belief is that a healthy culture is a shared culture, one created through shared stories, beliefs, purpose, plans, language, outcomes and ownership.

These aren’t little things; these aren’t things that you get right during an annual retreat. These are things molded over time with trust and passion and caring. These are things that evolve.

I don’t have all the answers, no one does, but I assure you this is the question that needs answering – How can I build a culture of shared commitment?

The following elements make up the foundation of a system of shared commitment.

Shared stories

The first step is to begin to develop, archive, curate and tell stories that illustrate what your business stands for.

Stories that tell why you do what you do, who you it for, why you’re passionate about it, and where the business is headed.

Throughout time great leaders have used stories to inspire commitment and attract community.

The central elements of a strong culture are the stories that employees tell themselves and each other. The why you would want to work here story, the orientation story, the here’s how we deal with challenges story, the here’s where we are headed story.
These illustrations are like oral traditions that allow culture to sustain, thrive and grow and it’s the job of the leader of the business to make story building an intentional act.

Shared beliefs

People want to work for more than a paycheck. Sure, they want to be paid fairly and in some cases the element of salary will be an important aspect of their decision to come to work for an organization, but perhaps more importantly, people want to work on something they believe in and they want to do that work with people that share their passion and beliefs.

This isn’t the same thing as saying, everyone in your organization has to maintain the same beliefs. However, by creating a set of core beliefs that everyone in the organization lives by and supports, you create a set of filters for how decisions are made, how people treat each other, how they treat customers, what’s expected, how to manage and even how to write a sales letter.

Shared purpose

For some time on this blog I’ve talked about the idea of connecting your passion with why you do what you do, or what some might call purpose.

In order to bring purpose fully into the organization you must determine a way to bring it to life and reinforce in every decision the organization makes.

This may take the form of an employee development program, foundation support, benefit package or community program. The key is to bring purpose to life by example. Your actions, or how you treat your staff, will speak far louder about purpose than any page in an employee manual. In order to create a shared purpose the staff must be your first customer.

Shared plans

The strongest, most productive cultures come to life when people know what to do and how to do it – In places where they are trusted to do go work and use their creativity to solve problems.

If you are to grow your organization to the point where it can serve you ultimate higher purpose, you’ll need to develop a system that enables people to manage themselves.

Now, that may sound a little foreign or perhaps even scary to anyone who’s worked in a typical hierarchical business structure, but it’s central to a fully alive culture.

The key lies in systematic planning thinking, clear accountability and consistent communication.

Shared leadership

While stories are an important way to attract and inspire people to join you on your journey, they can only take you as far as the leaders you develop around you.

After payroll is made and your business is generating sufficient cash flow I really believe that the leader’s primary role should shift to developing leaders internally.

In fact, as the owner of a business you’ll never succeed in reaching beyond where you are today until you are no longer the person that brings in the most work.

Teaching others to land the big fish, to tell stories, to create shared beliefs, to inspire and attract commitment means you have to invest time and resources in this very thing in a very intentional way.

This element of the shared culture comes by teaching your people what an ideal customer looks like, what a customer is desperately in need of, and how to communicate your core difference in a meaningful way.

It comes by teaching what everything costs, how profit is made, how every decision impacts a customer in some way. It grows by sending them to school, supporting their growth in other areas and demonstrating this is an organization that cares for the whole person.

Shared outcomes

One of the strongest ways to foster commitment is to get people to commit to a stake in the outcome of their work.

The only way I know to do this is to establish benchmarks, goals and indicators and then report and communicate progress religiously.

You must create reporting mechanisms that truly measure the most important components of your business. This will include key financial elements, but must strive to go far beyond into measuring success around shared beliefs and culture.

Shared ownership

The ultimate measure of commitment is achieved when people that work for your organization come to understand that they play a crucial role in creating the kind of company they want to work for – that the company is actually their most important product. (Of course the owner has to realize that first.)

This won’t happen until you help your people free themselves from the typical job descriptions and organizational charts so they can begin to manage themselves. It won’t happen unless they are excited about the journey they are on. It won’t happen until they fully understand how a dollar spent on a new desk equates to profit margin.

It won’t happen until they start thinking like an owner (and I mean in the good way) when it comes to meeting a customer’s needs. It won’t happen until everyone realizes they can help develop new business, build the community, create innovation, fix problems, right wrongs and make decisions that impact the organization on their own.